Like an off-label industrial process or cult ritual conducted in the dead of night, an artery flowing open in spurts or a complex society on the verge of collapse, ‘Neuroplasticity’ is both terrifying and morbidly enthralling to witness. Cold Specks has returned, two years and a world map of tours after 2012’s ‘I Predict a Graceful Expulsion’. Hailed as a masterful and wholly original debut, the follow-up is radically expanded, like an announcer realising they hadn’t turned on their microphone.
The 26 year-old Canadian singer under the sobriquet Al Spx has been a byword for rare talent and depth of feeling since her arrival in late 2011. In November, in the afterglow of first single ‘Holland,’ she performed ‘Lay Me Down,’ and ‘Old Stepstone’ on Jools Holland.
It turned into one of those shared national moments of cutlery-dropping, slack-jawed TV transfixion. She signed to Mute and released the first Cold Specks album the next May.
Work on the second album began while holed up in a cottage in Wick, Somerset the following winter. “In retrospect, I probably didn’t choose the most ideal season to live there,” she deadpans.
‘Neuroplasticity’ has since been constructed in fine layers, like a Rothko, building to a full, monolithic opacity.
“The record was mapped out in the cottage. I was there for about three months,” she says, “‘A Formal Invitation’, ‘Old Knives’ and ‘Absisto’ were essentially written there. They are the more unusual songs on the record. I may have been reflecting on my surroundings. Have you ever been to Glastonbury? It’s a pretty fucked up place.”
The time on either side was as new and exciting as it was cruel and exhausting. Presently she was back on the road again in the UK, Europe, the US and Canada. “I relentlessly toured for the first time. Travelling constantly was an odd adjustment at first. I’d always imagined road-trips to be exciting and generally fun. I found it all to be physically and mentally draining. Between tours I was mostly attempting to re-socialise.”
The gruelling schedule has awoken her writing to the full possibilities of her ensemble. Her voice is still central but on ‘Neuroplasticity’ the lights have been brought up on the instrumentation and arrangements, which are now deployed more boldly, in wider emotional registers that contend with the voice’s dynamism and scope. “I’ve successfully overcome whatever quarter-life crisis I was having and I think the ‘Cold Specks sound’ (whatever that means) is fully realised,” she says.
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